So we are on a sharp lookout, not just for land, but for corsairs, who favor the warm, tropical waters of the Caribbean we have entered. The captain has called several drills, but after the stumbling, inept performance of the crew he vows that it will be a better defense to fly a black pennant and pretend to have smallpox on board. Strange how we get past one danger only to worry about another. I suppose that is no different at sea than on land. If it were not so, we would all become sailors.
The captain puts out as much sail as possible, racing to reach landfall. It is not just attacks from corsairs that compels us but the danger of losing the chain of vaccinations we have so far maintained across the ocean. Two more boys have been infected, which means only three carriers are left, and two of them will be vaccinated in the next week. That leaves only Benito, whom I cannot account for. Our director suspects foul play, for how else could these contaminations be happening? They can no longer be the result of Tomás’s vaccination. Someone must be infecting the boys on purpose, sabotaging our expedition.
“But why would anyone do such a thing?” I ask him.
We are on deck enjoying the coolness of the night after the sweltering heat of the day. The boys were allowed one quick constitutional this evening to mark the end of their punishment. Now they are asleep in their quarters, guarded by Don Basilio and Don Ángel, though usually only one nurse attends them at night. But Don Francisco is taking no chances.
“Someone who wishes us ill. Who wants our expedition to fail.”
I run my mind over the crew. True, any number of men are capable of meanness, starting with our steward, angry at having been wounded. But the mystery can be more simply solved. Not foul play, but plain and simple play gone awry. The boys are crazed with confinement. Little moles, they burrow in every dark cavity of the ship. There is no policing them. I keep my eye on a dozen and three sneak away. I round up those three and two more run off! Last Friday, I discovered Gerónimo and Clemente in the sick bay, crouched behind the medicine chest during one of their hide-and-seek games. On another occasion, Jacinto hid himself inside a recently emptied barrel of rum and, growing hot, commenced licking the damp insides and came out reeling drunk.
“It could be as simple as that,” I suggest to Don Francisco. “Let us hope so,” he murmurs. But I can tell he is not convinced. Some heavy cloud hangs over him. Odd that now that victory is in sight, his faith should be flagging.
A strong breeze is blowing; the splashing rhythm of the water as we move forward is lulling. We are quiet for a while, listening to the pilot, singing an old sea chantey as he turns the wheel.
“Tell me a story, Doña Isabel,” Don Francisco says. “Something hopeful, like the stories you tell the boys.” He laughs, no doubt embarrassed by his whimsical request.
I would excuse myself, but I can tell he is in earnest. Man of science or not, he needs a distraction from his grim worries. And so I begin, describing our arrival, the crowds waiting at the port of San Juan, the hundreds who will be vaccinated before we depart. I mention all the places he has told me the expedition will visit, taking myself boldly along with it.
I stop when I hear him sigh, worried that I might be wearying him.
“Go on,” he urges me.
But I have run out of inspiration. Or perhaps I am afraid that if I continue, I will betray myself. “History will remember you,” I close. “And your own time will celebrate you.”
“I won’t pretend I am immune to recognition,” he admits. I smile at his apt choice of words. “But immortality, true immortality comes by not granting history the last word.”
For a moment I wonder that Don Francisco is expressing Christian sentiments. Up until this moment, he has not seemed particularly religious.
“We must not live entirely, or even mainly, for our own time. The soul exceeds its circumstances.”
The soul exceeds its circumstances. I am not sure I understand his full meaning, but hearing those words, my heart soars up to those very stars the mate taught me to connect into the shapes of gods and goddesses: Orion, the hunter; Andromeda; Perseus. Romance, reputation, glory, our director has attained them all already. Wedded love. Surgeon of the royal court. But still he strives for more than the world can give him.
“You will exceed your circumstances,” I portend.
“We shall see,” he says, as if he fears a different ending, and that is precisely why he asked me to tell him a hopeful story.
Thursday, February 9, port of San Juan
We are in the bay and going ashore soon. The boys are in their uniforms and I in mine. We sighted land yesterday late and none too soon. Today, Antonio Veredia and Andrés Naya are to be vaccinated, which will leave us only Benito. But now there will be plenty of carriers in Puerto Rico.
“Faith!” I keep telling Don Francisco.
He smiles a weary smile when I say so. “Yes, indeed, faith, that great virtue without which neither hope nor charity can live.”
A cannon is firing from shore, and our ship shakes with a booming reply of our own. And yet, despite this welcome, the mate looked through his spyglass a moment ago and reported the dock is deserted. Perhaps this epidemic we heard of has been even more devastating than we imagined. All the more glorious our timely arrival, bearing the cure on the arms of two little boys, and the nineteen who had preceded them.
A lone boat makes its way toward us, two Africans rowing, an official in uniform facing us. Certainly not the grand welcome I described to Don Francisco.
“Faith,” I tell myself, and write it down to make it more real. But the word looks strange, captured in ink, like a stuffed bird, so unlike the thing with beating wings.
5
Helen decides she wants to have a party, and since Thanksgiving is coming round, why not have it then. “It’d save everybody a lot of trouble,” Helen observes.
“You know, Helen, I might just kill you before your time,” Alma growls, a mock anger that she has settled on as the best pose before her dying friend. It’s either that or nonstop sobbing every time she looks at the old woman, visibly diminishing before her. They now weigh about the same one hundred pounds, “more or less,” which on the big-boned Helen is a lot less weight than on the birdlike Alma.
“It’s just all that cooking on Thanksgiving.” Helen waves a hand vaguely in the air, a form of ellipses she is using a lot these days, meaning, “You know what I mean.”
“I’m surprised she’d throw herself a party,” Claudine confides in Alma one day when their visits overlap—Claudine is leaving as Alma is dropping by. “I bet it’s that hospice social worker. I bet she talked Helen into having a party, a way to say good-bye to folks.”
“Knowing Helen, she’s having the party to make her social worker happy.” Alma laughs ruefully, a sob in her throat. But the longer she knows them, the more she doubts any of the hospice women would be conned even by the likes of sweet Helen.
They have been wonderful, the hospice “team,” as they call themselves, a nurse, a social worker, an aide, a nurse practitioner: Cheryl and Shawn and Sherry and Becky, a constant cycling through Helen’s house of the same kind of woman, short-haired, with strong, capable arms and the most soulful eyes, a very tribal feel to them.
Occasionally, they confer with the new minister at Helen’s church because Helen asks them to. “So as not to hurt his feelings,” she admits. Reverend Don is young and far too enthusiastic about the afterlife, in Alma’s opinion. But the hospice team has been great, not just with Helen but with Helen’s friends, Alma among them, gently leading her through this whole new world, old as can be, of the dying. What’s truly amazing is how they’ve managed to negotiate their way around Mickey. By the end of their first week of visits, the glaring former Marine is eating right out of their hands.
Alma supposes it has to do with how these women don’t fool around with gripes and grievances. They’ve got work to do and they won’t take no for an answer. And what is Mickey supposed to do when Cheryl, the nurse, holler
s from the bedroom, “Hey, Mickey, give us a hand won’t you,” as she lifts his mother up so as to put a clean sheet under her?
Claudine, meanwhile, has slipped Alma some of the self-help books she has borrowed from the social worker. Manuals about dying, among them the classic Kübler-Ross, which Alma devours overnight. What baffles her is that Helen doesn’t seem to have gone through all the stages the dying are supposed to go through. No denial, anger, bargaining, or depression; it’s acceptance right from the start.
“We don’t know that,” the social worker, Becky, explains to both women during one of their impromptu conferences out in the cold in the driveway of Helen’s house. Always what breaks up these “meetings” is Mickey coming out to get some wood from the woodpile or check on something in his pickup. “You gals still out here? Why don’t you come in and talk by the fire where it’s warm?”
Laughter and thanks and excuses. Everyone’s got somewhere to go. Besides, who wants to talk about all this stuff in Helen’s house, with her smells, increasingly unpleasant ones, in the air; her walker abandoned in the corner, an artifact from a time when the situation was grim but manageable.
“She probably has been going through all the stages for a while. And, besides, as you know better than I do,” Becky adds, “Helen’s always put a bright face on whatever is happening. So she’s going to do that now. People die the way they live, in character.”
It sounds like in a novel, Alma thinks. And Helen’s will have a happy ending, complete with roast turkey and three kinds of pie, and for the vegetarians, a lasagna with spinach. Helen is having part of the food catered by the Hard Day’s Night Cafe and the other part by a woman who used to work with her in the school lunchroom but now does Christmas office parties, weddings, anniversaries, and the occasional funeral.
MAYBE BECAUSE OF WHAT everyone is now calling Helen’s “courage,” Alma decides to face up to what she has been avoiding in her own life. Following up on her fax, she calls Lavinia, breathing a sigh of relief when the answering machine kicks in. But as soon as she identifies herself, Lavinia picks up.
“I don’t get it,” Lavinia says after a pause in which she is swallowing or smoking something. “You told me you were done. You were about to send it in.”
She goes on to detail the numerous instances, three years running, in which Alma has misled her. “I know,” Alma keeps saying in a small, sorry voice. This is her punishment, watching reruns of her shabby past that she thought was over.
Lavinia turns to what they can do now. Why not cobble together some of the saga chapters and call it a novel in stories? Stories seem to be making a comeback. When Alma refuses, Lavinia tries a part pep talk, part scolding approach. Alma is too hard on herself, too much of a perfectionist. Finally, Lavinia gives up. “Okay, okay. I’m not going to keep trying to talk you into it. You should call Veevee yourself. I mean, as a courtesy, if nothing else.”
Lavinia sounds genuinely sad. As does Veevee after Alma jogs the young woman’s memory—Veevee is at least a decade and a half younger than Alma. What is her excuse? Maybe people in cities age like dogs, one year of a New Yorker’s life equals seven of a Vermonter’s?
“Alma Rodríguez, you know, Fulana de Tal with the Latino saga novel?” Except she isn’t Fulana de Tal and there is no saga novel.
“Of course!” Veevee laughs. Alma imagines her, blonde and beautiful, fully sprung from an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. It makes her sad, thinking of all the heartaches this young woman is going to have to live through, until one day she ends up on the other side of a phone call, not unlike this one, apologizing for messing up.
“You want another year? I could give you two years. How about if we just tear up the contract and you hand it in when you want?”
Alma feels like crying. These women don’t want her to mess up. So much good-hearted energy should be harnessed and shipped somewhere, like to her own native country. This is what HI is supposed to do, Alma reminds herself, and nine times out of ten, to hear Richard talk, it doesn’t work.
But then, that one time out of ten, it does happen. And hope and history rhyme, a line in a poem she read Helen the other day. Helen is back to wanting things read to her. Alma suspects that it has less to do with Helen needing entertainment and more to do with keeping all the visitors that are coming by these days busy. Helen has so little energy. Getting herself in and out of bed, feeding herself, chewing food—just the minimal maintenance stuff exhausts her. And visiting is hard work. Especially the way Helen does it, paying attention, making the other person feel good.
“Sometimes when there’s no pressure, things really start to flow,” Veevee tries to persuade Alma. But as with Lavinia, Alma holds firm to her resolve. “Veevee, it’s not that.” Does she tell the young woman that she has lost heart? That she doesn’t want to work on a product that Lavinia can peddle, Veevee sell, and some poor soul pay to read? That’ll just make Veevee feel foolish, like some corrupt little cog in a wheel that is turning, turning, and going nowhere.
And it’s not that either. Veevee and Lavinia, and Sherry and Cheryl and Shawn and Becky, Claudine—they keep the world running. Somebody’s got to do it. Just like someone has to go to the edge and look and come back and tell about it. That was always her part, Alma thought. But what if what she has seen is not something she wants to broadcast? What if there’s nothing but the still, sad music of humanity over that edge? What does she come back and tell? We’re floating on faith. We’re floating on love. We, the lucky ones.
And the rest of the poor souls? The nine failed times out of ten? The ones caught between those opposing wheels of history and hope?
“Alma?” Veevee’s voice is concerned. “Are you with me? I mean, what I’m trying to say is that we’ll work with you on this. Why don’t you just let it rest for a few weeks, and then let’s talk?”
“Sure,” Alma says. Maybe if she hangs in there long enough, her publisher will be bought up by an even bigger publisher, for whom fifty grand is nothing, a small debt that can be forgiven, especially if Alma can’t be traced. Fulana de Tal. Last seen on the island of Tenerife, headed west, to save the world with a certain Don Francisco.
ALMA AND EMERSON HAVE been playing phone tag for days, so next time Alma drives out by the barnlike building where the offices of HI are housed, she pulls into the parking lot. Strange to be entering Richard’s stomping grounds and Richard so far away. A kind of nostalgia washes over her for those old times when she’d be joining Richard at an office party or coming to pick him up because one of their vehicles was in the shop. That first glimpse after an absence of someone you love, his face lighting up.
Now it’s Emerson’s face lighting up. So glad to see her. “You’d think we lived on opposite sides of the state! You’re looking terrific. Did I tell you my daughter’s reading your book in one of her classes?” Emerson says all the right things. He is the same age as Richard, born within days—they worked it out at a supper party—and both have the same basic, straightforward disposition: they are men of action, though a bigger engine drives Emerson, which is probably why Emerson is the head of the company while Richard is a mere site supervisor. But Richard has just taken a big step up, on-site directing, though Alma has sensed from the messages Emerson has left on her machine that he is a little worried that Richard might not be able to handle this assignment.
“I told Richard you were trying to reach him,” Alma says as she sits down on the other side of Emerson’s immense desk, a desktop computer to one side, a diminutive, humming portable beside it, stacks of files, a phone center with lots of options. Missing are the usual photos of wife and kids, rather wives and kids in Emerson’s case. Emerson has led a complicated life. Just the desk makes Alma feel that the power equation is off. She needs a reason to be here. To report a phone call. To bring him news of Richard. “He said he would try to call you.”
“We connected.” Emerson beams her his broad, appealing smile. Everything’s going to be just fine, the smile tells her. Aft
er all, the world is his apple, which he means to share with everyone. You’ve got to love this guy, Alma thinks. He is banking on it.
“I’ve been wanting to touch base with you,” Emerson begins, but almost immediately he is distracted by a letter that has been brought in for him to sign. There’s always a flurry of secretarial activity around him, a memo to initial, someone on the line, the file he requested being placed on one of the many piles on his desk. But Emerson is unperturbed. Alma doesn’t ever remember seeing him flustered or overwhelmed. He seems to thrive on a lot of things needing his attention.
“Why don’t we have lunch,” he suggests just as his telephone buzzer sounds. Someone getting back to him on line 1. “So we can talk,” he adds. “Give me a second.”
“Sure,” Alma says, though the conversation goes on and on. Somebody is very unhappy in the West Bank, and Emerson is trying to figure out how to remedy the situation. Alma gets up and strolls around the large office, looking at Emerson’s collection of art objects from around the world. Everything has a story, she is sure of it, the masks, the silken veil with bangles, the mortar and pestle big enough to grind human bones.
“Sorry about that,” Emerson says, sighing as he hangs up.
“Trouble?”
“No, not really.” Emerson smiles his handsome smile. It would take a lot to make Emerson admit there is trouble, Alma surmises. She recalls her own beloved Richard. Trouble is a state of mind and only the weak of will live there. Even the time they went over the side of the mountain in an ice storm, the car smashing through the guardrail, floating over the edge, and then miraculously—it was a miracle!—coming to rest by a tree stump, Richard kept assuring her, “It’s okay. A little ice, that’s all.”
“Just the usual. Personnel problems,” Emerson elaborates as he grabs his leather bomber jacket and calls good-bye to the flank of secretaries up front. Nothing he wants to talk about. He wants lunch. “The steakhouse be okay?” he asks as he leads her out. It’s either that or Hard Day’s Night Cafe, which would seem logical. They have known each other now for the decade she has been married to Richard, and Emerson still can’t get it through his head that Alma is vegetarian. “Steakhouse sounds fine,” she lies. Why make a fuss? There’s always salad, a big, tall glass of Bloody Mary mix. This is the trick to avoiding trouble, she thinks as she gets into Emerson’s sports car. No personnel problems at all if you just go along with the boss.